That's a sales pitch for TMF's Share Advisor Service that they are selling, not 'an article'.

And, as I suggested before, TMF seems to be talking out of both sides of their mouth, as here's a sales pitch for TMF mutual funds http://www.foolfunds.com/philosophy/index.aspx The theory (if you believe the sales pitch) is that TMF mutual funds 'solve' all of the issues that they see with mutual funds, so these mutual funds are not really 'bad' mutual funds like other mutual funds. But they are still mutual funds,

As with all sales pitches, you need to take everything with a signficant grain of salt. You seem to have embraced the part of the Share Advisor sales pitch of "Forget funds and buy individual shares" without any salt.

I read an article about investing vs. gambling on Investopedia a while back so I could provide a reasonable answer to those, like my mom, who might say putting money into the stock market is the same as gambling. The short version is that when you invest you are providing companies with more working capital to increase production, expand, hire more people, etc... Something is actually produced with your money.

I would say that there is an element of gambling in all stock market investments. But the more diversified you are, the more you can mitigate the risk, which decreases the gambling element. With a total portfolio of $5,000 invested in 2 high-flier stocks, you have not only not mitigated your risk, you have increased it.

With gambling, a ton of people give money to a "pot" and a lot more lose than win. The losers end up with nothing.

Enron, WorldCom, Chrysler, MF Global, Pacific Gas & Electric, Conseco, CIT, General Motors, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, American Airlines - to name a few losers that ended up with little or nothing.